


Teach

by karanguni



Category: Hikaru no Go
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:28:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22587913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: When they are thirty-eight, Shindou picks up a waif.
Relationships: Shindou Hikaru/Touya Akira
Comments: 12
Kudos: 202
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Teach

**Author's Note:**

  * For [izayoi_no_mikoto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/izayoi_no_mikoto/gifts).



When they are thirty-eight, Shindou picks up a waif.

This seems entirely reasonable behaviour for Shindou, which is how Touya knows that they have spent far too many years tangled up in each other's affairs.

He finds out completely by accident, as usual.

'Touya-kun,' Shindou's mother says to him one evening when he and Shindou are visiting for dinner. She traps him in the kitchen, where Touya is busy washing up to ameliorate Shindou's uncurable laziness.

Touya schools panic off of his face with the benefit of years of competitive Go experience. 'Yes?'

'Are you two...' She trails off. 'Is it that you two want to adopt?'

Touya nearly drops the plate he's holding into the sink. 'Excuse me?' he goes, immediately wild-eyed.

'It's just that Hikaru keeps talking about the girl he's teaching Go to...' Shindou's mother trails off a second time. Touya gets the sense that he is supposed to be enlightening her about Shindou's latest life event. 'He caught her trying to break into the storeroom last week when he was here helping us move some furniture.'

Touya, who'd had an autopilot response of _whatever Shindou is doing, your son is not a sexual predator_ on the tip of his tongue, pauses as he parses what she's said.

'No, Shindou-san,' Touya assures the woman who has come, over the years, to be a second mother to him. 'We are not thinking of adopting.'

'Oh,' goes Shindou's mother, and Touya finishes the dishes and flees before he can think too hard on how the look in her eyes had bordered on disappointment.

* * *

Shindou does not, it turns out, want to adopt. Touya thanks all the gods he knows for this: he would make a horrible father, which means Shindou would only make a _worse_ one.

'She's a punk,' Shindou declares when Touya interrogates him over this new student/thief of his. 'A middle-schooler. She talks back to me all the time! It's unbelievable.'

'What was she doing in the storeroom?'

'Finding things to steal that she could sell to fuel some obsession she had over some, I don't know, game or something,' Shindou shrugs, as if it's perfectly natural for criminal middle-schoolers to do this sort of thing. 'Grandpa left so much in that storeroom that we never cleared it up, not really. But I should have kept it better locked for mum and dad...'

Shindou, unusually, starts to look distant, and Touya is immediately suspicious; Shindou has never much cared for responsibility. He'd left the door to their apartment unlocked so many times when they had first moved in together that Touya had had to beg their landlord to replace the lock with one that auto-engaged when shut.

Touya decides to prod, just slightly. 'You haven't reported her to the police, I'm assuming?'

'Oh, no,' Shindou waves a hand in the air, snapping back into himself. 'She plays pretty good Go for someone who knows nothing about it.'

* * *

Touya comes to watch the next time Shindou plays the thief-child at a game of _shidougo_ at their local salon. It turns out that Shindou is bribing her into showing up by offering her pocket money.

'It is her _parents_ who are going to report _you_ to the police,' Touya points out, despairing.

'Nah,' says Shindou, casually dismissing the potential death of his reputation. 'She'd never tell them.'

'That does _not make it better_ ,' Touya hisses, but then the thief appears. She sticks her hand out and demands payment before sitting.

'Who's this?' she asks, eyeballing Touya.

'Touya, this is Minami-chan,' Shindou introduces them. 'Minami, this is Touya. He's pretty good at Go, I _guess_.'

Touya sighs.

He watches the game.

Minami is not "pretty good" at go.

Minami is _awful_ at it.

* * *

Shindou keeps teaching her. Touya is fairly certain that, by the summer, Shindou has funded Minami's entire collection of Gundam figurines, but still Shindou persists.

'Why are you doing this?' Touya asks him one night as they lay in bed together. 'Your mother asked me if you wanted to adopt.'

' _What?_ ' Shindou yelps, sounding deeply horrified. 'No! What the hell gave her _that_ idea?'

'The fact that you are paying a middle-school child for the privilege of playing very bad Go?' Touya suggests. 'The Go Association can barely get you to show up for your _actual_ teaching sessions.'

'Everyone takes time to start, and she's got talent in there somewhere,' Shindou grumbles, subsiding when it becomes clear that Touya has no interest in children. 'Anyway, what are you going to do about Ogata in your match next week? You've got to pound that asshole's face in for me for the last Meijin qualifier...'

The subject stays changed.

* * *

Touya knows better than to try to get Shindou to talk about something he doesn't want to talk about, so he decides to watch more closely instead.

It takes him a month to stop fixating on Minami's perfectly normal failure to be anything other than a beginner and to start noticing Shindou's teaching style.

It's not like Shindou. It's _not_ Shindou. It's something else.

 _It's Sai,_ Touya thinks to himself in disbelief as he watches Shindou cackle in delight at some crackpot play that Minami attempts.

He stops asking questions. It eases a thread of tension in Shindou that Touya had not realised was there.

* * *

'Play me,' Touya tells Minami eight months into Shindou's tutelage.

Minami stares at him. 'What makes you think I'd want to do that, old man?' she asks, belligerence her default mode of response. Still, she is indefatigable now, when it comes to Go. Shindou is no longer paying her to show up: she shows up because Shindou had bribed her into signing up for her school's Go club, which in turn created in Minami an obsessive need to beat the club's third-years. Touya can see perfectly well now that pride and obstinacy are going to be the foundational pillars of Shindou's future student group; Minami is as good a first disciple as any, considering that Touya – and all of the Association – had long given up hope of getting Shindou to teach anyone anything, much less take on actual pupils.

'Play me,' Touya repeats, firm, and pushes the goke over.

Shindou arrives five minutes later – a mere fifteen minutes late for his teaching session – to find Minami scowling at the board as she considers her next move.

'What are you two–' he starts, but then catches the look on Touya's face. Shindou sits down without another word, and watches in silence.

Touya plays as unlike himself as Shindou has been in his teaching. Normally Touya is a good _shidougo_ teacher: he's been called patient to a fault by more than one pro. But today he plays like Shindou: fierce, challenging, too good for Minami to beat, and without intent on teaching her anything but the scale of what Go still has in store for her.

He sees Shindou realise this. He sees Shindou get angry.

'Help her,' Touya challenges without looking up. 'If you think she needs it.' He feels Minami bristle from across the board.

He senses Shindou hesitate, and for a moment tension hangs heavy between them, but then something in the air shifts. 'Not yet,' Shindou replies, voice steady. He could be playing Touya for a title, the way he sounds. 'This is her game still.'

Minami looks between the two of them, uncertain and angry but sure that something is passing between them, but then she turns back to the board and focuses.

Touya knows she will be a great credit to Shindou when, fifteen minutes later, she turns to her teacher and says, 'Hey, rich guy, I think I need a little help.' Her tone is snide, but Touya can sense the longing there too: _help me play this game the way it needs to be played_.

Shindou drags his chair over to settle up behind her. 'I'll suggest what you can do, okay?' he tells her. 'But you decide what move to make, and you put down the stones.'

He starts.

Touya watches Shindou murmur quiet suggestions into Minami's ear. He watches her take them nearly entirely wholesale, and a game that should have ended in disaster for white starts turning around into a fierce battle: the kind of battle that Touya has only ever played with Shindou, the kind that Touya can win utterly and still feel like he's lost. Touya watches Shindou _teach_.

* * *

They walk home after Minami yells at the both of them: they'd played like idiots, and how does she become an _insei_ anyway, and why is Go _so_ stupid that she has to keep playing to see if there isn't more to this dumb game than just – ugh.

Touya gives her the Go Association's website and tells her that he'll make sure Shindou will help her with the necessary arrangements. She stomps off.

Shindou is uncharacteristically silent on their walk back. Touya grazes their shoulders together and says, 'Sai must have been an excellent teacher. You do him proud.'

Shindou freezes mid-step. Then he turns to smile at Touya, bright as the sun, and says, 'Yeah. Yeah, Sai really was.'


End file.
